Clear Light of Day Themes

Clear Light of Day describes the fraught relationships among the four Das siblings—Bimla (“Bim”), Tara, Raja, and Baba—by interlacing scenes from their troubled childhood in the 1930s and 1940s with the story of Tara’s trip back to their family grand, decaying Old Delhi home in 1980. After their parents’ deaths, the siblings cope in different ways. Raja and Bim turn to literature and dream of living out heroic adventures, but they…

In Clear Light of Day Anita Desai uses multiple timelines to explore how memory can change over time and shape people’s sense of self, as well as how a person’s changing sense of self over the course of their lives can also shape what they remember. For instance, Desai frequently depicts Tara and Bim reminiscing about events in one part of the novel before revealing elsewhere in the novel how those events really unfolded, and…

Clear Light of Day is set in Delhi in part during the summer of 1947, as the partition of India and Pakistan gives both nations independence—but also sets off deadly riots between Hindus and Muslims across the subcontinent. Instead of experiencing these riots directly, the Hindu Das family, which is facing its own serious internal divide, gets to go up on their roof and watch them from a comfortable distance. After all, they live in…